


Missed

by hrhrionastar



Series: The Honeyverse [5]
Category: Legend of the Seeker
Genre: Episode: s01e22 Reckoning, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 06:22:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/671278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hrhrionastar/pseuds/hrhrionastar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Confessor knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missed

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning** : miscarriage; Confessors think life begins at conception

"I lost the baby."  
  
"What?"  
  
Kahlan stood at the edge of the balcony. The stone ran out inches from her toes. Her skirts actually billowed over empty air.  
  
Darken had to clasp his hands behind his back to keep from snatching his bride from that edge. She was his. She would not escape him so easily.  
  
Kahlan rounded on him in a swirl of skirt, the dying sunlight catching the ruby of her Rada-Han in one brief searing flash. "The baby," she said. "I lost her."  
  
To Kahlan even a child she'd told Darken she'd first felt in the womb eight days ago was _her_ , not it.  
  
Darken swallowed his own disappointment. While she was with child he had not really believed Kahlan would simply step off the balcony onto nothingness, but he sensed the madness of her grief even if he didn't share it.  
  
While Darken mourned for Cara, his death would not help her, nor did he have much patience for the excessive sentimentality that might make Kahlan choose death rather than life without Richard. When he had first proposed their deal to her, he had not guessed how deep that suicidal streak of hers ran; he trusted that their child would inherit his love of life.  
  
Darken prudently took Kahlan's hands in his. In this mood she was liable to strike him, if she didn't simply fall back off the balcony and into the Underworld.  
  
"I understand that these things do happen," he said gently.  
  
" _Not_ to _Confessors_ ," hissed Kahlan.  
  
Darken risked letting go of one of his wife's hands to cup her chin and turn her face to his. He preferred that Kahlan glare at him rather than the ground. He wanted her smiles, her joy, her screams of ecstasy, but he would settle for her glare so long as she was glaring at him.  
  
"Shame, Kahlan," Darken said, naming what he saw in her eyes. "Why? This is not your fault."  
  
"Confessors _never_ …" Kahlan began. Then she jerked her chin impatiently out of his grasp and twisted to look out over the balcony again, directly at the last rays of the setting sun.  
  
 _Someday she'll be blind_ , Darken thought. _Why not? She's already deaf—to me, to the world._  
  
 _To everything but the Keeper-cursed Seeker._  
  
"I felt her spirit," Kahlan tried to explain. "She was here, with me," she touched her stomach, "and then she wasn't. I woke up and…it was like falling. Except I haven't hit the ground yet."  
  
She laughed. Darken doubted that she was amused.  
  
"Confessors know we're with child so early because we can feel souls. You couldn't see her, no one could feel her but me. But my child had a soul, and that soul is gone. I killed her."  
  
"Our child," Darken corrected automatically. He stepped directly behind Kahlan and embraced her, pinning her arms to her sides and resting his chin lightly on the top of her head. The few stray tendrils of hair that had escaped her coiffure ticked his nose. "And no, you didn't." She had not harmed the tiny potential life she'd carried. Darken would have known.  
  
And in any case, if Kahlan had planned to get rid of the child why would she tell Darken she was pregnant? It wasn't as if she exactly overwhelmed him with confidences.  
  
Kahlan leaned back against Darken's strength. It was a rare moment of frailty for her.  
  
"How can you be sure?" she asked in a little girl voice that frankly surprised Darken. Her moment of weakness should have pleased him—and it did please him that she let him see even this small glimpse of her true self—but on the whole he found he preferred the fierce Mother Confessor to this woebegone girl-woman.  
  
"Trust me," he meant to command. It came out more as a plea.  
  
A sudden gust of wind sent Kahlan's skirts and Darken's robes flaring out. The sun had slipped below the horizon now. Pink and orange streaks bled into one another and blurred before Darken's eyes.  
  
Kahlan might not understand yet, but she was his. They would try again for a child. They would be a family.  
  
Kahlan belonged with Darken—body and soul.


End file.
